Hillary Clinton secretly pushed the Obama Cuba deal

Although President Obama is taking the credit for Wednesday’s historic
deal to reverse decades of U.S. policy toward Cuba, when Hillary Clinton
was secretary of state, she was the main architect of the new policy and
pushed far harder for a deal than the Obama White House.

From 2009 until her departure in early 2013, Clinton and her top aides
took the lead on the sometimes public, often private interactions with
the Cuban government. According to current and former White House and
State Department officials and several Cuba policy experts who were
involved in the discussions, Clinton was also the top advocate inside
the government for ending travel and trade restrictions on Cuba and
reversing 50 years of U.S. policy to isolate the Communist island
nation. Repeatedly, she pressed the White House to move faster and faced
opposition from cautious high-ranking White House officials.

After Obama announced the deal Wednesday, which included the release of
aid contractor Alan Gross, Clinton issued a supportive statement
distributed by the National Security Council press team. “As Secretary
of State, I pushed for his release, stayed in touch with Alan’s wife,
Judy, and their daughters and called for a new direction in Cuba,” she
said. “Despite good intentions, our decades-long policy of isolation has
only strengthened the Castro regime’s grip on power.”

Yet Clinton played down her own role in the issue, which will surely
become important if she decides to run for president. Top prospective
Republican candidates, including Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have
all come out against the president’s policy shift.

Clinton’s advocacy on behalf of opening a new relationship with Cuba
began almost as soon as she came into office. Obama had campaigned on a
promise to engage enemies, but the White House initially was slow to
make good on that pledge, and on the Cuba front enacted only a modest
relaxation of travel rules. From the start, Clinton pushed to hold Obama
to his promise with regard to Cuba.

“Hillary Clinton played a very large role,” said Steve Clemons, a senior
fellow at the New America Foundation who advocated for changes to
U.S.-Cuba policy. “The president, when he ran for office and when he
came in, thought that doing something on Cuba front would be smart. But
as soon as he got into office, though, every other priority hit him.”

Obama first met Cuban President Raúl Castro in April 2009 at the Summit
of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago and announced he wanted to
discuss changes in U.S. policy toward the Havana government. But the
president faced criticism when he got back to Washington, also because
he had shaken hands with then-Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.

“After that experience at the Summit of the Americas, the White House
feet had been burned, they basically didn’t do much. The National
Security Council didn’t do anything, but the State Department continued
to try hard,” Clemons said.

After the initial easing of the travel ban, the administration had
prepared a second batch of measures to expand travel and trade licenses.
But shortly before an expected announcement, the White House got cold
feet and shelved the initiative, according to people briefed by the
White House. Members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee had
persuaded White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett to intervene at the
last moment. Clinton was displeased but undeterred.

“Cuba was on her mind. I know that she raised it a number of times. The
White House wasn’t ready to move but she kept that in play,” said Clemons.

Arturo Valenzuela was assistant secretary of state for Western
Hemisphere affairs and Clinton’s point man on Cuba at the time. He
worked with Ricardo Zuniga, who was the head of the department’s Office
of Cuba Affairs, behind the scenes to meet with Cuban officials in 2009,
2010 and 2011 to explore ways to move forward.

“There was no question that there was strong support in the State
Department for liberalizing some of the restrictions and Secretary
Clinton was quite clear about that,” Valenzuela told me. “I asked
Zuniga, with the secretary of state’s blessing, to draft some further
liberalizations of the travel ban, and that led to a significant shift
of the opening up of general licenses.”

Clinton also directed Valenzuela to talk personally with Cuban Foreign
Minister Bruno Rodriguez in New York in October 2010, the highest-level
diplomatic meeting of U.S. and Cuban officials ever. But one serious
impediment to a grand bargain with the Cuban government remained: the
Cubans refused to consider releasing Gross, whom they accused of spying.

Nevertheless, throughout 2011, Clinton and her team continued to press
the White House to take further steps on Cuba. In early 2011, frustrated
by what she saw as resistance from the Obama political advisers as well
as the NSC staff, Clinton met personally with the president and nudged
him to keep going.

“The pushback was coming from the White House staff. The issue was for
Hillary to say to Obama, ‘Hey listen, your folks are going too slow on
this and we need to move forward on this,’ “ said a former
administration official who was involved in those discussions. “There
was a lot of reluctance in the White House to do that at the time
because of various kinds of domestic problems. If it hadn’t been for the
State Department and her leadership, then these reforms might not have
happened.”

Finally, in 2012, Clinton made one more big push for faster movement to
overhaul the relationship. At the Summit of the Americas that April in
Cartagena, Colombia, Clinton was repeatedly harangued by Latin Americans
leaders about Washington’s insistence that Cuba not be allowed to
participate. Clinton was blindsided by the unanimity of this criticism,
including such staunch U.S. allies a Colombian President Juan Manuel
Santos, who had personally pressed Obama on the issue.

“It’s evident to me that Cartagena was a wake-up call for then-Secretary
Clinton,” said Julia Sweig, a Cuba scholar at the Council on Foreign
Relations. “She had a head-snapping experience there and came to see the
unanimity of the Latin American view such that recovery of American
standing in the region really ran through Havana.”

After returning to Washington, Clinton directed her head of policy
planning, Jake Sullivan, to work up several options to lay out a policy
approach and present it to the president. The result was, in essence,
what Obama announced Wednesday, a source close to the process said.

In June, 2013, after his re-election, Obama made the personal decision
to pursue a grand bargain with the Cubans. Talks moved to Canada and
were placed in the hands of White House staffers, including Zuniga, who
had moved over to the NSC from the State Department. Clinton was gone,
but Obama picked up her ball and ran with it.

In her book “Hard Choices,” Clinton wrote that she asked Obama to “take
another look” at the U.S. embargo on Cuba, which she described as
ineffective and harmful to America’s standing across the region. In that
sense, she owned up to the position she held while she was in office,
even if she didn’t reveal the extent of her involvement.

Nobody knows if Cuba will follow the path of countries like Vietnam,
where economic engagement has been followed by a degree of political
opening, or China, which reaps the benefits of capitalism while
maintaining strict domestic repression. Clinton is betting on the former.

Either way, if she does run for president in 2016, Republicans can cast
the new policy as her policy, not Obama’s. She was a major author of the
effort and will rightly be the recipient of the credit, or the blame,
depending on what happens in Cuba between now and then.

JOSH ROGIN IS A BLOOMBERG VIEW COLUMNIST WHO WRITES ABOUT NATIONAL
SECURITY AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS.

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